eternity. Thus its causality—both efficient and final—has arisen after not having existed. On your account, therefore, the First must have become an efficient and final cause of everything that occurs after not having been so. This invalidates what you have said about it.

It may then be said:

If this is possible for it, then it is possible that the celestial spheres came into being because the causality responsible for their coming into being arose, and that they were preceded by successive events, inhering in it or separate from it, none of which is individually eternal.

[The Second Argument]

It may be said:

Why do you say that what is potential cannot be brought into actuality by its agent without a separate cause?

His statement is:

“Because, if there is no cause other than its essence for bringing it into actuality, it must coexist with that essence; but if it has a cause other than its essence, the first cause would not truly be a first principle.”

He may be told:

You have not made the First a principle of the existence of everything else in the sense that it is their agent and originator. Rather, you have made it a principle in the sense that it is an object of love and desire.

Merely being an object of love and desire does not entail the existence of the lover, his essence, his attributes, or his acts.

Thus, on their account, the First is not a principle on its own. Indeed, what you have described is even further from being a principle: being an agent whose action depends on something external is closer to being a principle than being nothing more than an object of love.

[The Third Argument]

It may be said:

What do you mean by saying, “If there is no cause other than its essence for bringing it into actuality”? Do you mean an essence devoid of any act inhering in it, or an essence characterized by an act inhering in it?